Wheel of Stars

You are watching, and listening to, a musical clock made of stars.

To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched
by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains
position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the
stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock -- it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You'll notice some familiar constellations, such as
the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note,
or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star's BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume
is based on the star's magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

Basically, this is a very literal kind of "music of the spheres," and is typical of my projects, which often involve circles and music. This
idea for making a music box out of stars was a natural progression from some previous projects of mine, like the Whitney Music Box, and Musical Chess, which you might also enjoy.

October 2009:
Since this was featured on BoingBoing, I've
had requests for MP3s, MIDI controllers, screen-savers, southern hemisphere variants, lower-pitched versions for
those with tinnitus, and a parallax-controlled version.